Communications Lab

A. Concept

The memory that I want to pick as the subject for my Memory Soundscape project is the memory of walking down a city street in the winter (or even during Christmas season). Some aspects of the memory that I aimed to convey to my audience is the elements of a city and strong winter weather. I knew I wanted to include elements of walking outside and elements of Christmas in my soundscape.

 B.   Process

1. The sounds I used for my soundscape were walking with heels both indoors and outdoors, sounds of background noise both indoor and outdoors, car noises, and the sound of a sink being turned on and off. I recorded all those sounds by themselves. I had initially wanted to include sounds of snow crunching and the jingle of bells, but I was unable to find and record those sounds. I compromised by using the song “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey to emulate the feeling of Christmas, before I knew that I couldn’t use a song.
2. My editing process was pretty smooth, since all I had to do was combine the sounds into one coherent track to listen to. However, one challenge I had was the my cuts were too harsh. I tried fixing this by having my sounds fade in and out to signify a change in atmosphere. Another one of my sounds was too short for what I needed it to be, so I had to duplicate the recording I had to make it longer. I found that my background sounds were a little too loud for my liking, so I had to lower their volumes. 

 C. Conclusion

If I had more time, I would have wanted to look for sounds that could replicate the sound of feet stepping in snow, and record the sound outside during a windy day so I can have the feeling of being windy and cold. I could also have looked for a set of bells that the school probably has and used it to further emulate the feeling of Christmas without having to explicitly use a song. 

A feedback I received was that I was not allowed to use a song, which I could have replaced with other sounds that also convey the Christmas feeling, 

• Steyerl talks about how the “unbroken belief” of the documentary form is challenged. What does Steyerl mean by this? Certain movies and films are based on a true story.  How does truth inform the fiction? How might fiction inform the truth?

What Steyerl means by the “unbroken belief” of the documentary form is challenged is that although documentaries are known for showing reality and the truth of the events, they are now more emotionally driven, which turns away from reality. In terms of films and movies that are based on true stories, the truthful event informs the fiction of the film, but the inaccuracies of the fiction can lead the the truthful feelings and emotions during those events. The inconsistencies in these films and documents are what create the “uncertainty”, since we don’t know what the truth and reality is. 

• What is the significance of the authenticity and representation of the truth in the media that you consume on a daily basis? What is the role of a live broadcast?

The media that we consume on a daily basis is never truly a representation of the truth, since the information will always be coming from a biased standpoint. There are always multiple sides to a story, and people will take advantage of that to market something as the “truth”. The role of a live broadcast is to attempt to eliminate bias, but like in documentaries, even if their intent is to be as authentic as possible, the filmmaker is able to shift the focus to themselves in the situation. 

A. Sara Mui, The Worlds of Gaming
B.  Concept
Since my photograph for part 1 was of a switch, its controllers, and some game cards, I thought it would be nice to make my part 2 image related to video games. Since there is a similarity in the topic that I wanted to make my diptych, I wanted to show a difference in what they depicted. Image 1 is a real-life photograph taken with a camera, so I wanted the photoshopped image to be the complete opposite of reality. I decided to make the photoshopped image as if it is an alternate universe that the gaming console takes you into. 

C. Process
(1) When looking for things to photograph, I was inspired by a switch controller charging port that my friends own. I decided to make that the central focus of my image. I tried adding different things around it to spice up the image, and then rotated other items through the setup, trying to find the best setup for my images. 

I asked Professor Ian about my compositions, and he said that it would be good to fill up the space around the switch controllers. I tried two different compositions before deciding that the game cards would be better to use because it relates to the rest of the items in the frame and makes the image more coherent. 

(2) I was inspired by the backgrounds of Mario levels and wanted to recreate one in image 2 using parts of the photographed image 1. I initially made the game cards the ground and the witch itself the buildings with the top of the controllers as flowers hung from the wire of the switch.

However, Professor Ian said that my image was too representational, so I took his advice and made more abstract elements using the pixelate and mosaic functions in photoshop.

I asked Professor Ian for his advice again and he said that I should stray away from the concept of a landscape image so I changed my elements a little bit. I redid my game card element and used distortion to show movement in the piece, using the game card pattern as a pathway from the realistic photographic above into the fantastic image underneath. 

D. If I had more time, I would’ve incorporated lighting into my photoshopped image 2, since I received feedback that my image 2 looks too flat compared to image 1. I had lots of gradients and shadows in image 1 and could have translated them over to image 2. 

I also would have liked to create a better still life in the first image so I could have had a better composition to work with in image 2. I think that if I had taken better photos with more variety, I would have been able to incorporate more images from my contact sheet into my final piece. 

E.  Image of Diptych

The memory that I want to pick as the subject for my Memory Soundscape project is the memory of walking down a city street in the winter (or even during Christmas season). I wanted to pick this memory because as the weather is getting colder and we are nearing the end of the year (aka Christmas) I have been getting more and more homesick for the things I used to hear and feel back home. I wanted to replicate these sounds as a way for me to remember and reminisce about the times I used to hear these sounds. With Christmas often being referred to as a magical holiday, I wanted to emulate those feelings of magic and awe through my sounds.

Some sounds I can incorporate in my soundscape are feet crunching through the snow on the pavement (or just footsteps on a sidewalk), the movement of cars with some honking noises, the noises of very strong winds, and perhaps the jingles of Christmas bells. I want the elements of a city and strong winter weather to be represented in my soundscape so that I can create an experience for listeners that they can hopefully recognize and identify with. 

“Fluidity of the digital” refers to the result of a change in photography culture. This phrase means that photography has progressed to a point where digital photos can be easily manipulated, which contradicts the way that photographs were supposed to depict the truth in reality. An example of this is the image shown below. Clearly there is not an animal that exists currently that is a hybrid between a butterfly and an elephant. However, digital technology has advanced enough to be able to combine those two animals together and still make it look like the creature was photographed.

Compared to other media, I would say photography is more capable of capturing reality. This is because although it is pretty easy to edit a photograph, it does still have to be changed on an image that was photographed in the first place. I feel that text is the most unreliable way of capturing reality because it is very easy to manipulate and text can also be used to describe the same thing in very different ways. Photography can be framed in a way that makes something look unreal, but there is an element of reality in there. And because video is a combination of multiple photos, one would have to apply that change many times for it to work through a video. Virtual reality is capable of capturing reality, since it allows the person to be in an immersive experience, but I feel that technology would have to advance more to be able to recreate our current realities. 

Dream of You – Chungha (with R3Hab)

My thought process behind my design was visualizing parts of the music as lines and seeing what shapes/paths they would take as the song progressed. I had three main focal points in my design, which were each inspired by an element of the song. The bass is very sharp and short, which I interpreted as zig-zag lines. Since the bass runs throughout the entire song, I made the zigzag lines take up the whole page from one side to the other. I employed the Gestalt principle of continuity, especially when the zigzag breaks in the middle. The letters in the middle are supposed to show the chorus, where she sings “don’t make me” repeatedly in a circle. However, there are breaks between each “don’t make me” and I wanted that to be represented by the incomplete circles, which were supported by the Gestalt principle of closure. Finally, I wanted something to connect these two polar opposite concepts together and represent the rest of the song. I thought that wavy lines would be good for this, since it incorporates both elements, with smooth lines that have sharper deviations. I put them on the edges of the page to balance the other things on the page and to show that this fluidity is constant and appears within the whole song.

I brainstormed a few ideas in doodles before reaching one that I wanted to create in illustrator. I made a very simple design with the basic concepts I wanted and showed it to Professor Ian. He suggested that I add a set of lines to break the harsh movement that was going from top left to bottom right. I then added a set of parallel wavy lines, but then he suggested that I either change them to straight lines with letters or abstract wavy lines. I went with the latter because I thought it would demonstrate my concept more clearly. 

If I had more time, I would change more of my lines into letters for more variety. I also had a small zig zag line that went in the middle of each big zigzag, but I took it out due to conflicts with the wavy lines. Professor Ian said at my final that he wished those lines were still there, so I would have liked to put them back in. 

  

The existing system of technology we chose to do is virtual meetings. We chose to do virtual meetings because we thought it would be an interesting concept to explain to the aliens, since it has become so important for us in our daily lives. Video calling has always been a significant part of our lives, since we were able to talk to people who weren’t near us. However, there was a time when only two lines were allowed to connect, meaning that if a third person were to try and join a call, they had to be with one of the people that were already on call. However, this changed with virtual meetings. With time, technology had advanced enough that we were able to have multiple lines on a voice call. Eventually, this expanded to include video calls as well. 

Especially since the start of the pandemic, there was a huge emphasis on the need to interact with people without seeing them in person. This was when the use of virtual meetings exploded, since everyone needed to participate. One example of this is the platform Zoom, where multiple people can join one meeting and be able to see and hear each other while being remote. This allowed people from all over the world to communicate with each other in one place while we weren’t even allowed to go outside. Zoom was extremely useful with meetings and classes, where both lectures and discussions were taking place.

Our story with virtual meetings can resonate with the heptapods because it is essentially how they are able to communicate with us. An object that the heptapods already have is their looking glass. The looking glasses are described as “twoway communication devices” with the heptapods in orbit, meaning that they were not interacting with the scientists in-person (4). With these looking glasses, the scientists were able to see, hear, and communicate with the heptapods simultaneously in real time. This is essentially what virtual meetings are, except that multiple people/videos are projected into one “room”. Virtual meetings are different from simply connecting two calls together, since those already exist in the heptapod universe (at the looking glasses where the heptapods are able to interact with the humans). They include multiple calls at the same time going to the same digital location, meaning that in the aliens’ scenario, they would be able to connect all of the looking classes together and be able to interact with both the heptapods and the humans all around the world. 

In our visual representation, we tried depicting virtual meetings using images only. We have the globe in the center to show that this takes place on a global scale. We have signal towers to show that even though this takes place at different places, they are interconnected with a system of signals. On the left side, we have three separate individuals who all see the same individual on the right side. However, on the right side, that individual can see all three on the left. This shows that there is communication between multiple people on the same service.

• How do aliens in the story language and communication style different from the human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?

The way that the aliens communicate in the story is different from how we communicate in many ways. One is that they communicate orally through “flutters” that are virtually indiscernible from each other, whereas we produce sounds that can clearly be differentiated from other sounds that we make. Another difference is that their spoken and written language are not related at all, while we write and speak the same things. The heptapod’s written language is simultaneous, which means that they have to know what they will be writing before they write it. It is different from human’s sequential language.

• How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?

Humans physically go through a sequence of events when they communicate, whether it be the process that it takes to speak or if we are trying to communicate using gestures made with our body. It takes this sequence from beginning to end to know what humans are trying to communicate. However, the aliens do not need this sequence since they operate simultaneously and not sequentially.